With the Ottawa Citizen’s recent look at MPs’ attendance records and finding NDP-turned-independent MP Sana Hassainia’s voting attendance to be poorest, something she blames largely on the demands of childcare, we find ourselves again talking about the need to make Parliament a more “family-friendly” institution. The problem, however, is that many of the proposals that get bandied about are ones which may have far more harmful unintended consequences.

The first suggestion tends to be doing away with Friday sittings, which seems easy enough as they are more sparsely attended and the early question period is often the scripted duels of deputy critics versus parliamentary secretaries, with but a couple of cabinet ministers or “designated front bench babysitters” in the chamber. It’s a nice enough idea, but the problem is that the sitting hours during which legislation gets debated would need to be made up somewhere else. That means either evening sittings, or sitting into the summer.

The Commons used to have evening sittings three nights a week, but those were done away with in the early 90s as an attempt to be more “family friendly,” allowing MPs to go back and try to have dinner at home and put their kids to bed, so those are out. And the problem with sitting into the summer is that summer in Ottawa can get pretty hot, humid, and downright unpleasant if you’re sitting in an old stone building with inadequate air conditioning and you’re still forced to wear a jacket and tie. Never mind that MPs would rather be back in their ridings where they can see their kids now that they’re out of school, and you get back to the same problem.

Electronic voting is another suggestion that comes up, but it’s one that I have a really difficult time abiding for a couple of reasons. The first is the inherent symbolic act of standing votes. Parliament is an institution steeped in symbolism, and the act of having your representative stand for what they believe in is a powerful sign. The second is that votes are the one time of the day when you’ll find all MPs in the chamber. This is important because it allows MPs a chance to meet, to corner cabinet ministers if they have a particular file that they need addressed, and it allows them the collegiality of being together. This is an important thing.

It also ties into the suggestion that MPs should be allowed to teleconference or Skype their appearances in to committees. Again this is problematic on the basic level of the loss of human contact – not only with the nine other MPs on the committee, where true collegiality can develop, but also in face-to-face contact with witnesses and stakeholders, where contacts are made, conversations can be had in hallways, and MPs can get a chance to have those kinds of discussions with those coming before them to really understand the issues in a way that you can’t do talking to a screen in five-minute rounds.

We’ve also seen how the loss of face time between MPs has led to a more hostile environment, which started happening when they did away with evening sittings. Before that, MPs would break at 6 p.m., head upstairs to the Parliamentary Restaurant (in part because of the dismal choices that were available in the parliamentary precinct at the time), and they would dine together and forge friendships over food and drink before heading back to debate at 8 p.m. We don’t have those opportunities any longer, and Don Newman was famous for saying that it was the single largest blow to collegiality on the Hill. Receptions by lobbyists at the Chateau Laurier simply haven’t been able forge those same friendships across party lines.

We continue to demand that our elected representatives be more collegial without providing them opportunities to do so, and now we propose to take away the remaining places where that collegiality can still happen.

All that will be left for the largest concentrations of MPs to gather will be question period, the time of day when they put on their partisan hats and make a show of acrimony.

This isn’t to say that there shouldn’t be conversations about things like the availability of childcare on the Hill for MPs, or that MPs shouldn’t try to schedule themselves better or even learn to say no to events in their riding when they’re over-committing themselves. The parliamentary calendar already does a lot to accommodate travel needs with Monday mornings and Friday afternoons being essentially off, but any other changes need to be very carefully thought through. After all, the unintended consequences could wind up making parliament dysfunctional as a whole – something that wouldn’t serve any Canadian.

Dale Smith is a freelance journalist in the parliamentary press gallery.

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